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Daniel Hochhalter Posts

As I write this, it’s a gray Saturday morning, with the rain pounding against my window. Today is very different from yesterday, which was a sunny Friday. Specifically, it was Good Friday.

Just hours ago, I attended my church’s Good Friday service. As always, it was an unsettling time. A time to do three things: Remember Jesus’ death. Eat the elements. Go home.

There was no message about the resurrection. No announcement about Easter Sunday activities. No promise of coming hope.

Not that I’m complaining. In fact, I think Good Friday should point to the cross, not the resurrection. Because Jesus’ death is too important to forget. And it’s only bearable because in hindsight, we know it wasn’t the end. When Jesus spoke his last words – “It is finished” – he meant his work on earth in the flesh, not his whole story.read more

I have finally come kicking and screaming into the twenty-first century: I am now on Facebook. I have resisted social media because: 1) I find the interaction to be somewhat superficial, and 2) I’ve never heard of journalists or potential employers checking a person’s social media and finding anything which raised their estimation of him/her. However, due to the upcoming book launch, my publisher asked me to start a Facebook page. So I pulled the trigger.

One important part of setting up a page (other than figuring out how to get the stupid thing to work the way I want it to) is to find “friends.” But that’s a broad term. On Facebook, sometimes getting “friends” feels more like feeding a narcissistic urge to see how many people remember me.read more

I know it’s been discussed to death, but I finally had a chance to see Darren Aronofsky’s movie “Noah.” I love the story of the Bible and I love epic movies, so I was looking forward to seeing this one.

On one hand, I enjoyed the bigness of the story. I’m a guy who enjoys good visual effects, so for me this movie was a fun – though very loose – interpretation of a familiar story. It was sort of “Genesis meets Lord of the Rings” – with giant stone people (Watchers) instead of Tolkien’s tree people (Ents). And it did agree with the Bible that the Creator sent the flood because of humanity’s great sins.read more

The Internet is buzzing about the latest rant against God from Bill Maher. Set off by the upcoming movie Noah, Maher calls God a ”psychotic mass murderer” who “drowns babies” and has “anger management issues” worse than Russell Crowe’s. Many Christians are shocked, offended, and even enraged by what he said, and everyone seems to be talking about it, so I thought I would offer my two cents as well.

Thought #1: Bill Maher is an atheist. What else would we Christians expect from an atheist? Atheists don’t believe what we believe. They mock what we hold sacred. They will blaspheme a God who, to their way of thinking, does not exist. We can’t possibly hold the expectation that they should treat us and our beliefs with respect.read more

February is always a difficult month for me because it marks the anniversary when my doctoral dissertation died a sudden and violent death. February is the month that I flew out of England for the last time.

This February, like the last six, was not a happy time. I approached it with a sense of dread, grief and sadness, still feeling the pain of the loss of my work. This February, though–the sixth since my postgraduate research went sideways–I had the joy and thrill of a recently-signed book deal, and with it a sense of newness. It is a new chapter. Perhaps a sense of hope. Yet I continue to grieve. The loss still stings.read more